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Negotiating post-apartheid boundaries and identities : an anthropological study of the creation of a Cape Town Suburb

Broadbridge, Helena Tara (2001-12)

Thesis (PhD)--University of Stellenbosch, 2001.

Thesis

ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This study explores the complex and contested processes of drawing boundaries and
negotiating identities in the post-Apartheid South African context by analysing how
residents in a new residential suburb of Cape Town are working to carve out a new
position for themselves in a changing social order.
Drawing on data gathered through participant observation, individual and focus group
interviews, and household surveys between November 1998 and December 2000, the
study examines how residents draw and negotiate boundaries in their search for stability,
status, and community in a society characterised by social flux, uncertainty, ambiguity
and contradiction. It explores the construction and shifting of identities believed to be
embodied in those boundaries, at the levels of the individual, the household and the
community. A range of everyday social and spatial practices - including streetscape
design, its use and contestation, neighbourliness and sociality, .household livelihoods and
strategies, home maintenance and improvements - are shown to reveal residents' own
conceptualisations of boundaries, their practical significance and symbolic power, as well
as their permeability and transgression. The marking and maintenance of boundaries
convey how social relationships, practices and power in the suburb are structured and
continually negotiated. By analysing these actions and responses, the study illustrates
some of the ways in which recent changes in South African society have unsettled the
relationship between class, race and space to construct new boundaries and shape new
identities.
The fmdings suggest that although social differentiation among the residents is
increasingly being restructured around class, race remains a salient variable in residents'
constructions of themselves and each other. Ethnic-religious prejudice is also shown to
influence local conflict and constructions of community.
The study draws out four discourses through which residents contemplate and formulate
circumstances and processes in their neighbourhood. The first emphasises racial
integration, the second middle class suburban living, the third safety from crime, the
fourth distrust and disorder. The discourses are significant, not only in their practical
manifestation in everyday interaction but also because they suggest some of the ways in
which connections and disconnections with the past, with (he old identities and the old
affiliations, are managed in a new, post-Apartheid South Africa.